Category Archives: Faculty Lecturer

“limbo like me”: A Reading of Kamau Brathwaite’s “Caliban”

Kamau Brathwaite, image from New Directions Books

Someone called Edward Brathwaite makes a brief appearance in Roberto Fernández Retamar’s famous 1974 essay “Caliban: Notes toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America.”  Like Caliban in Aimé Césaire’s play A Tempest, Edward Brathwaite later changed his name.  But whereas Césaire’s Caliban demands that Prospero “call me X” (20), Brathwaite chose the name Kamau. It was suggested to him by the grandmother of the Kenyan novelist and theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who currently teaches at UC Irvine!  The name Kamau itself ultimately comes from the east African Kikuyu language and is said to mean “quiet warrior.”

Brathwaite’s journey from a highly conventional English name to a subtle and empowering African one is a journey toward an ancestral identity that holds the possibility of self-determination. A similar journey was taken by Brathwaite’s native island Barbados, which gained independence from its 341-year-old identity as an English sugar colony in 1966. Like many other Caribbean islands, Barbados has long had a large, poor population of African descent; its own name means ‘bearded ones’ in Spanish and might refer to the hanging roots of trees or to the beards worn by the indigenous people encountered by the Spanish when they arrived in the fifteenth century. The island’s original name in Arawakan is “Icirougandin,” meaning red land with white teeth; today the people who live there simply call it Bim.

The people of Bim speak a ‘creolized’ English that is richly mixed with the rhythms and vocabularies of the African cultures of their ancestors. The uniquely fluid music and dance forms of the island grow out of those same traditions. Distinctive to Barbados and shaped by the embodied history of its people, the rhythms of these songs and movement patterns infuse Kamau Brathwaite’s poems. The poems themselves have been published in books whose titles— The Arrivants, Middle Passages, and Masks—retrace Afro-Caribbean histories of slavery and dislocation. Yet Brathwaite’s poems are vibrant with life and hope as they embrace the possibilities of an ever-changing world. Brathwaite himself coined the phrase “tidalectics” to describe linguistic patterns in which different idioms, sounds, voices, rhythms, and moods flow, unite, disperse, and then reunite in new configurations.

The cover of then-Edward Brathwaite’s Masks (1968), later appearing in the collection The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1978).

These fluid energies animate Brathwaite’s poem “Caliban,” which first appeared in his 1968 volume Masks. What is a mask? It is an assumed identity, one that often frees the person behind the mask to access and express buried parts of his or her own identity. Masks also play a vital role in African religious rituals, where they sometimes channel supernatural powers and sometimes provide protection from them. By calling his collection of poems Masks, Brathwaite tells us that he is interested in ways to tap into one’s deepest identity while also playing with alternative identities. Shielded by a mask, we are sometimes emboldened to speak the truth.

In “Caliban,’ Brathwaite puts on the ‘mask’ of Shakespeare’s Caliban so he can speak the truth of a decolonizing subject’s search for identity. Written in Caliban’s own voice, Brathwaite’s poem starts in an unidentified Caribbean city that sometimes seems to be Cuba’s capital, Havana. The city is awash in the grim debris of colonization. As colonization’s high tide has receded and European powers have departed, the island peoples have been left destitute, invisible, erased by history. Brathwaite’s poem starts out with a grim tally whose heavy weight is reinforced by repetition and a ponderous rhythm from which it seems there can be no escape:  “Ninety-five per cent of my people poor /ninety five percent of my people black/ ninety-five percent of my people dead.” Caliban speaks not for himself but for “my people.” He even speaks as his people, or allows them to speak through him.

So as to make the plight of  “my people” universal, Brathwaite’s Caliban next invokes the prophet Jeremiah, the biblical book of Leviticus (which is preoccupied with laws that separate the living from the dead, the pure from the corrupt), and the modern existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Caliban’s island—apparently Cuba—suffers under the weight of dead modern machines left behind on land that also seems dead, incapable of yielding the vital substances that the living need, such as cotton or bread. Echoing Shakespeare,  Brathwaite’s Caliban turns to Ariel’s beautiful song of transformation from death to life (“Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made”). But when Caliban echoes Ariel’s song, life becomes death. Caliban’s modern island has become a world of dead ends: “out of the living stone out of the living bone/of coral, these dead/towers.” Caliban remembers political revolutions that should have brought freedom but resulted only in more oppression in the form of police abuse and even addiction to the toys of capitalism. While there is the hint of an impending storm (“the sky was cloudy, a strong breeze”), the weather only marks the Caribbean islands’ vulnerability to hurricanes, today thought to be more intense and destructive than in the past, thanks to global warming—a legacy of the European scientific enlightenment, and thus also a legacy of European colonialism. The Europeans, other words, are gone but they have left death, sorrow, and devastation in their wake. Caliban’s “people,” lifeless and impoverished, must somehow recreate themselves out of these materials.

And yet Braithwaite’s poem does not end in this world of death. Far from it! The final lines are bright with hope, and alive with new rhythms and images: “the dumb gods are raising me/up/up/up/and the music is saving me.” Caliban, who at first could only helplessly lament the plight of his people, now feels himself lifted and saved. Those early, ponderous verses sinking into blocks have dissolved and the poem stretches out long, its verse suddenly free and lithe, pulsing with life as it moves “up/up/up” along with Caliban himself.

But just how does Caliban find his way from death to life, from stasis to movement, from despair to hope? He is, to course, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Caliban, who likewise longs to break free of the chains Prospero has put on him. This modern Caliban takes Shakespeare’s own imagery and plays with it until it begins to play for him. But in order to revitalize that imagery, he infuses it with the tempos and cadences of Caribbean speech, dance, and and music. This is a poem that celebrates the sound of the human voice. The best way to appreciate that is to listen to this recording of Brathwaite reading the poem.

When you listen, you will hear the voice of the Caribbean islands, melodious, playful, its own thing. That doesn’t mean that Brathwaite’s Caliban leaves Shakespeare’s Caliban behind. The middle part of his poem is an extended riff on Caliban’s euphoric “‘Ban, Ban, Caliban; have a new master, get a new man.” This is the song Shakespeare’s Caliban sings when he believes he has found a way to break free of Prospero’s tyranny. Without escaping from Prospero’s language, Shakespeare’s Caliban plays with it, rearranging its syllables to suggest new meanings, “new” possibilities of identity and power, and even “freedom.”

But Caliban fails to break free of Prospero. By the end of the play, he is back under the magician’s thumb. That isn’t true of Brathwaite’s Caliban: he has broken the spell! But how? Is it just because he has access to other traditions and realities that belong to him and his people, not the colonial powers that have killed and erased “ninety-five percent of” them?

The key is what we might call the “middle passage” of Brathwaite’s poem—the part between its beginning and its end. I borrow this term from Brathwaite’s later volume of poems Middle Passages, where you can find his other Tempest-inspired poem, Letter Sycorax, in which Caliban steals Prospero’s laptop and uses it to reconnect with his mother’s language and “curse [Prospero] wid his own cursor.” The “middle passage” refers to the forced transportation of human beings from Africa to the Caribbean; many went to the North American colonies, and many others died in transit. Throughout his work, Brathwaite is keenly aware of the middle passage as part of the tragic history of ‘my people.’  The middle passages of his poems—the parts in the center that move us from the beginning to the end—are always important.

So what happens in the middle passage of Caliban?  This is where Caliban breaks into dance, and as he “prance[s],” he begins breaking words down, experimenting with new ways of ordering them, literally creating space for himself with dashes and wide-open margins:

And
Ban
Ban
Cali-
Ban
like to play
pan
at the Car-
nival;
pran-
sing up to the lim-
bo silence
down
down
down

Here the playful, lifting cadences of island music displace the heavy, meter of the first part of the poem. The longer this Caliban sings in his native voice, the more possible it is to “ban”—get rid of—the legacies of colonial rule. Brathwaite’s Caliban liberates himself through free “play” and unbridled pleasure, through joyful experiment with what words might do spontaneously. The middle of the poem—again, the part that connects but also separates the bleak, heavy scene at the beginning from the energy of hope at the end—consists entirely of such play, thus showing how creative language can be a passport to freedom, allowing Caliban to create himself as he wishes. Hence Caliban dances as well as sings, “pran-/cing up to the lim–’/bo silence..”

But just what is the “lim–/bo silence”? Limbo in Catholic theology is the suspended state between heaven and hell. By suspending the word “limbo’ itself between two lines, Brathwaite captures this sense of suspense and makes it part of the active experience of his poem. By isolating the syllable “lim,” Brathwaite also echoes the word “limb,” evoking the part of a tree that can be turned into a stick.

The limbo itself is a dance involving a stick. You may have done the limbo yourself at a skating rink. This internationally popular game originated in the Caribbean islands. There dancers pass under a horizontal stick suspended between two vertical ones which is lowered after everyone has gone under it. Of course, not every dancer manages this; those who do not are eliminated, while those who succeed get more and more creative, often showing off their talent for contortion and fluid movement. Because of the physical skill and personal creativity involved, the limbo is a popular tourist attraction in Barbados, and even a source of income for many Caribbeans. This gives it a double meaning: the limbo celebrates versatility, flexibility, and originality. But it is also performed by acrobatic native dancers for the pleasure of American and European visitors whose money holds up the islands’ fragile economies. Here ‘s a picture of  a street performance of the limbo:

The Irwin Clement Caribbean steel band in London, 1963. Image from Heritage Images/Getty.

Caliban imports all of these aspects of the limbo dance in his poem: “down/down/down”; “knees spread wide.” And the “limbo stick” itself appears many times in the poem, as if to transform Prospero’s magic stick—an instrument of domination—into a toy for Caliban to play and dance with. Appropriating Prospero’s stick into a new dance allows Caliban to appropriate its power for his own purposes of freedom and self-creation. As he dances, the verse form of the poem mirrors the alternation between flattening and lengthening that is part of the dance.

It would be very nice if this were all that is going on in the middle passage. But as Caliban dances the limbo, more troubling elements creep in. This is a dance for tourist consumption and as such it suggests continuing dependence on American and European money. More significant still: where did the limbo come from? As he dances, Caliban tells us;

limbo like me
long dark deck and the water surrounding me
long dark neck and the silence is over me
limbo
limbo like me
stick is the whip and the dark deck is slavery . . .

What is happening here? It turns out that the limbo is not just a popular nightclub dance. It was originally developed by African slaves who had survived the middle passage. It was even performed at wakes—rituals in which survivors sit beside the bodies of the dead. The pattern of increasing confinement mimics the often fatal experience of being crowded into the hold of a slave ship and dehumanized inside its “long dark neck.” Here is a schematic image of that crowding so you can see what it was like:

A plan of a British slave ship, showing how 454 slaves were placed on board. According to transport records, however, this same ship reportedly carried as many as 609 people. This image was published by the Plymouth Chapter of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and is now held by the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division.

As the limbo “stick” lowers, dancers reenact that suffocating confinement. When they manage to come out of it, they celebrate the triumph of release. But each time the is stick lowered, fewer people make it under, through, and up. The limbo is thus a dance of elimination, if also of triumph for those who survive. In this way, the dance is a form of living cultural memory. In its negative side, it recreates the condition of death. In its positive side, people survive and emerge on the other side, unfold and rise in the miracle of survival.  Even the spirits of those who die might be imagined to have been released by death into the freedom of an afterlife that this very ritual perpetuates. But the message is a mixed one.

By turning Shakespeare’s ship of nobles into a slave ship and Prospero’s wand into a stick he can play with and master, Caliban finds his own voice. He gives “My people” a common history and shows them how to use it to move forward. We hear “drummers” and feel the action of “dumb gods” who can still speak through the body. That is why. at the end of the poem, Caliban sings that “the music is saving me.”

The last thing we experience in the poem, is Caliban’s “hot/slow/step/on the burning ground.”  He is remembering how to walk again on the shores of a foreign land. But this is also an image of hell. Destruction goes with creation. And Caliban’s steps are slow. The way forward is painful and difficult. Will he find his way? If he does, it will not only be because he transforms the dark past but because he has learned to traverse its troubling surface.

Works Cited/Referenced

Brathwaite, Edward. Masks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. Print.

Césaire, Aimé. A Tempest. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: TCG Translations, 2002. Print.

Retamar, Roberto Fernández. Caliban and Other Essays. Translated by Edward Baker. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Print.

Jayne Lewis is a professor of English at UC Irvine, a faculty lecturer in the current cycle of Humanities Core, and the director of the Humanities Honors Program at UCI. Her most recent book, Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660-1794 (Chicago, 2012) looks at how, when and where “atmosphere” emerged as a dimension of literary experience—an emergence which links the history of early fiction with those of natural philosophy and the supernatural. She is also the author of The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1650-1740 (Cambridge, 1995), Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (Routledge, 2000), and The Trial of Mary Queen of Scots: A Documentary History (Bedford, 2000). Her present research and much of her ongoing teaching focuses on middle modern generic forms in relation to changing narratives of illness and healing, including a course on the “sick imagination” that explores illness narratives from the Book of Job through 21st-century poetry and graphic fiction. She has previously contributed to the HC Research Blog on the topic of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.

Vinayak Chaturvedi’s Winter Quarter Playlist

 

Asian Dub Foundation performing live in Berlin, November 2008

To the delight of students and seminar leaders alike, Professor Chaturvedi has been sharing politicized songs that bring together musicians and sound profiles from the South Asian and Afro-Caribbean diaspora before each of his Humanities Core lectures. Here is his essential HumCore playlist, along with some videos and additional information about the artists that have been featured.

Steel Pulse, “Handsworth Revolution”

More information on Steel Pulse available here.

Burning Spear, “Marcus Garvey” and “Christopher Columbus”

More information on Burning Spear available here.

Asian Dub Foundation, “Rebel Warrior,” “Fortress Europe,” and “Naxalite”

More information about Asian Dub Foundation available here.

State of Bengal, “Flight IC408”

Riz MC, “Englistan”

For more information about the Asian Underground movement in 1990s British rock, Professor Chaturvedi recommends Vivek Bald’s documentary Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music. You can also stream music like this (along with newer bands) through the BBC Asian Music Network.

Vinayak Chaturvedi is an associate professor of history and faculty lecturer in the Humanities Core Program at UCI this cycle. He is the author of Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India (University of California Press, 2007) along with many articles on South Asian social and intellectual history, including “A Revolutionary’s Biography: The case of V.D. Savarkar” in Postcolonial Studies, “Rethinking Knowledge with Action: V.D. Savarkar, the Bhagavad Gita, and Histories of Warfare” in Modern Intellectual History, and “Vinayak & Me: Hindutva and the Politics of Naming” in Social History. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The Beautiful and the Constant Imoinda”: A Consideration

Peter Lely, Portrait of Aphra Behn (before 1680)

“The beautiful and the constant Imoinda” (77). These are the last words of Aphra Behn’s 1688 novella Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave, a work justly celebrated for its exploration of race and power through the figure of Behn’s titular protagonist, the “royal slave” Oroonoko. It is Oroonoko’s story that captures our attention and arouses our admiration, frustration, and horror, and it is Oroonoko who gives the book its title. Yet in a narrative that foregrounds issues of names and naming, Behn’s female narrator ends not with Oroonoko’s name but that of his wife and lover. And, as is not the case with Oroonoko, the narrator expresses no ambivalence toward her. Indeed, while the second half of the novella refers to Oroonoko by the name his European purchasers impose on him—Caesar—Imoinda’s original name is restored to her in Behn’s final sentence.

Why all of this should be is a question worth asking, for it tells us that Imoinda is as important as Oroonoko to Behn’s analysis of power in a ruthless colonial world where heroic ideals of beauty, constancy, and honor are under siege. Literary historians know that Behn published a number of romances like Oroonoko in the last years of her life, and that they tended to spotlight female protagonists, who usually appear in their titles: The Fair Jilt, The History of the Nun; The Adventure of the Black Lady; The Unfortunate Bride. If Oroonoko had been titled Imoinda, what kind of story would it have been? Would we like Oroonoko himself less or more? And in relegating Imoinda to the edges of the story we have, is Behn perhaps drawing our attention to the ways women are invisible or marginalized in all of the cultures she explores in her tale? Who is Imoinda and why and how does she matter?

In an important essay also cited in Vivian Folkenflik’s blog post on Oroonoko’s market scene, the literary critic Laura Brown observes that Behn’s “narrative must have women, and it generates […] female figures at every turn, as observers, beneficiaries, and consumers of Oroonoko’s romantic action” (235). Brown is referring partly to Behn’s female authorship and female readership at the time of the book’s original publication. But she also reminds us that Behn is interested in Oroonoko’s relationship to women—a relationship that is presented as a key component of his virtue and identity as a romantic hero. His undying ardor for Imoinda in the decadent court of Coramantien is one of the things that elevates him: he was, claims the narrator, “as capable of love as it was possible for a brave and gallant man to be; … for sure, great souls are most capable of that passion” (16). Behn’s female narrator wryly leaves it an open question as to how “capable” of love Oroonko might actually be, but Imoinda is first introduced in the context of his “passion” for her. This is treated as a source of equality and ultimately as the source of Oroonoko’s subjection to her: “To describe her truly, one need say only, she was female to the noble male the beautiful black Venus to our young Mars, as charming in her person as he, and of delicate virtues. I have seen an hundred white men sighing after her and making a thousand vows at her feet…and she was, indeed, too great for any but a prince of her own nation to adore” (16). Sure enough, the instant Oronooko sees Imoinda, she “gained a perfect conquest over his fierce heart” (17). The narrator stresses Imonda’s power over the warrior Oroonoko while also stressing the purity of their love in a “country, where men take to themselves as many as they can maintain” (17).

But if Imoinda is at first presented as powerful, her reality in a world where “men take [women] to themselves” is somewhat different. Oronooko himself “vows that she should be the only woman he would possess” and seems to regard her as his property at the same time that he idealizes her and acknowledges her sway over his heart. More to the point, their love story unfolds in the decadent court of Coramentien, bound by customs that privilege male sexual authority. Thus Oroonko’s hundred-plus-year-old grandfather, the king, identifies the “maid” Imoinda as the perfect woman to serve his own sexual desires in the “sort of seraglio” he maintains (21). The king is obsessed with Imoinda’s physical virginity, as is Oronooko, and equally obsessed with being the sole possessor of this “treasure” (21). Imoinda is valued as property belonging to men and despite the ways Behn’s imagery makes her Oroonoko’s equal, she—unlike him—has no real control over her body. She is forced to grant the old king unspecified sexual favors and all of the conflict that erupts at court is over the question of which man has the right to own her. As Brown puts it, “the desirable woman serves invariably as the motive and ultimate prize for male adventures” (334).

The critic Charlotte Sussman is even more pointed: “Imoinda is a possession even before she is a slave,” Sussman writes, and her “exile in Surinam […] is not so much a transition from freedom to slavery as a transition from one code of property relations to another” (247). At issue here is the “transition” itself. It contrasts with Oroonko’s transition into captivity: where he is tricked by  a slave trader and is in that way complicit in his own domination, Imoinda is passively sold by the king. She has no choice about the fate of her body—a state that persists in the New World. Here her owner, Trefry, is tempted to rape her and her pregnancy prompts Oroonoko (now Caesar) to revolt against European colonial rule because her child (which he regards as his) will belong to her owners, not to her. Hence, though Imoinda and Oroonoko are equally matched in many ways—Venus to Mars, elite courtier to elite courtier—Behn reminds us again and again that Imoinda’s body has never belonged to her. While most of our attention is drawn to the domination of one religious and ethnic group by another, Behn also suggest that, the world over, one gender is programmatically dominated by the other.

Most feminist criticism, like that of Brown and Sussman, focuses on the ways Imoinda is depicted as a “possession” rather than a person. Clemene, the name she is given in the so-called New World, seems to claim her as the property of those who rename her, and when Oroonoko slits her throat not long before his own death, he not only characterizes her as “the price” he has paid for his own “glory,” but buries her only up to the neck so that “only her face he left yet bare to look on,” as if to claim her as an art object that belongs to him (72). At the same time, however, we are told that once Oroonoko had done so, ”he had not power to stir from the sight of this dear object” and we also learn that she herself wanted to die: “He found the heroic wife faster pleading for death than he was to propose it” (71). It is also Imoinda who urges Oroonoko to revolt. Once she “began to show she was with child, [she] did nothing but sigh and weep for the captivity of her lord, herself, and the infant yet unborn” (61). And during the rebellion itself, Imoinda fights heroically beside her husband on a continent whose major river, the Amazon, is named after the legendary women warriors of the Greco-Roman past: “Imoinda who, grown big as she was, did nevertheless press near her lord, having a bow and quiver full of poisoned arrows, which she managed with such dexterity that she wounded several and shot the governor in the shoulder” (65). (Tellingly, it is another woman—“an Indian woman, his mistress”—who has the power to heal the governor by sucking the venom from his wound.)

Behn’s Imoinda can thus express her power and heroism only in limited, oblique ways. She is constrained by the realities of cultures that privilege men whether they are in Surinam or in Coramantien, or indeed in England, where Behn’s implied (female) reader resides. But, as Sussman observes, within these constraints, Imoinda finds ways to “take [her] biology into [her] own hands” (253), paradoxically controlling her own physical life by giving power over it away to her husband. Oroonoko’s spectacular brutalization commands most of our attention, but Behn wants us to see Imoinda’s as well. Unlike his, hers happens in the day-to-day and as a matter of course. When Behn celebrates her great beauty—the beauty that marks her as Oroonoko’s romantic equal—she thus also makes us see Imoinda’s pain, her scars. Praising Imoinda’s “modesty and her extraordinary prettiness,” Behn’s narrator also notices that she is “carved in fine flowers and birds all over her body” (48). Imoinda’s body registers an indigenous African body art not constrained by the European standards that Behn asserts elsewhere: “I had forgot to tell you,” says Behn’s narrator,

that those who are nobly born of that country are so delicately cut and ra[z]ed all over the fore part of the trunk of their bodies that it looks as if it were Japanned, […] the works being raised like high points round the edges of the flowers. Some are only carved with a little flower or bird at the sides of the temples, as was Caesar; and those who are so carved over the body resemble our ancient Picts that are figured in the chronicles, but these carvings are more delicate. (48)

Why did the narrator almost “forg[e]t to tell” us about Imoinda’s beautiful scars? Why is she telling us about them now? Perhaps because they have always been there, taken for granted in something of the way that the earth itself—evoked in Imoinda’s “flowers and birds,” the tree-like “trunk” of her body—is taken for granted, and wounded so “you” can live. The word “world” appears again and again in a novella whose action covers a good part of the globe. Imoinda’s body here is a world. Not just a natural world but a world of nations: it is “japanned” (seeming lacquered), it recalls the “ancient Picts” of Britain who were also tattooed, it is created through the indigenous arts of Africa, and it brings to mind the vegetation we see in Surinam. Imoinda is the world, Behn seems to say, the world at its best, harmonious and fertile and diverse.

So it is no wonder that “Imoinda” is the last word of Oroonoko. It’s an unusual name that Behn probably made up. But we cannot help but notice the first letter—“I”—that links her to the “I” of the female narrator. And the second syllable, “moi,” is the French word for “me,” tightening that link while reminding us that this is a name that incorporates the beauties of many different languages. The slave name imposed on Imoinda, Clemene, is all but forgotten. But the word “Clemene” recalls the idea of “clemency,” meaning forgiveness and, ultimately, grace. In the brutal world of power that Behn depicts, “the beautiful and the constant Imoinda” leaves open the possibility of grace.

Works Cited

Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko, ed. Janet Todd. Penguin, 2003.

Brown, Laura. “The Romance of Empire; Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves.” In Oroonoko: An Authoritative Text, ed. Joanna Lipking. Norton, 1997, pp. 232-46.

Sussman, Charlotte. “The Other Problem with Women: Reproduction and Slave Culture in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.”  In Oroonoko: An Authoritative Text, ed. Joanna Lipking. Norton, 1997,  pp. 246-55.

Jayne Lewis is a professor of English at UC Irvine, a faculty lecturer in the current cycle of Humanities Core, and the director of the Humanities Honors Program at UCI. Her most recent book, Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660-1794 (Chicago, 2012) looks at how, when and where “atmosphere” emerged as a dimension of literary experience–an emergence which links the history of early fiction with those of natural philosophy and the supernatural. She is also the author of The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1650-1740 (Cambridge, 1995), Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (Routledge, 2000), and The Trial of Mary Queen of Scots: A Documentary History (Bedford, 2000). Her present research and much of her ongoing teaching focuses on middle modern generic forms in relation to changing narratives of illness and healing, including a course on the “sick imagination” that explores illness narratives from the Book of Job through 21st-century poetry and graphic fiction.